Doves Type

ROMAN MARS: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. 

Here at 99PI, we do stories about all kinds of things, stories about architecture, about transit, about history, even the occasional sports story. But one kind of story that always elicits a huge response from a very vocal constituency are stories about type. You guys love stories about fonts and typefaces. So a couple of months ago, I was having dinner with Helen Zaltzman and her husband and collaborator, Martin Austwick. And she told me about a story they developed for a live stage show about an epic feud over a typeface of all things. And I knew I had to get that story on the show. 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: We’re talking about two people who set up an artisanal printing press, which was kind of unusual at the time. They were very groundbreaking in their way. And it was also not really something that people did if they didn’t already have money. 

ROMAN MARS: You might recognize Helen’s voice if you, like me, are a listener to The Illusionist or Answer Me This, but this piece is an adaptation of an Illusionist live show that Helen and Martin did called Souvenirs. Here it is. 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: This is the story of the friendship of Thomas Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker and of the implosion of that friendship. We know the impact of what they said to each other, but we don’t know their exact words, so Thomas will be performed by the glockenspiel… 

[GLOCKENSPIEL]

HELEN ZALTZMAN: And Emery by violin… 

[VIOLIN]

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Two friends brought together and driven apart by type. Yes, “type” as in printed lettering. I’m the narrator, Helen Zaltzman, and this is our orchestra and chorus, Martin Austwick. 

MARTIN AUSTWICK: [SINGING] “Type” means the design / The way that letters look / And the little bits of metal / That print words in a book.

HELEN ZALTZMAN: We find Thomas and Emery in London, in the district of Hammersmith, where their houses were, and their workplaces. We don’t know exactly how they first met in the late 1880s, perhaps in your favorite local pub, the Doves. In a tightly packed bar, you could have bumped into each other. 

[GLOCKENSPIEL]

HELEN ZALTZMAN: “Sorry!”

[VIOLIN] 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: “That’s alright!”

[VIOLIN] 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Maybe one of you bought the other a drink, you shared a joke, did all the getting to know you chat. “Where did you grow up?” “Where’d you get a good price on mustache wax these days?” “Who’s your favorite Spice Girl?” The same one! However it happened, sometime, somewhere, your friendship was born. 

MARTIN AUSTWICK: Friendship never ends / The Spice Girls taught us so / We’ll be each other’s ride or die / Until it’s time to go.

HELEN ZALTZMAN: You two ran in the same circles because you shared two major interests, socialist politics and printing. A friend describes you, Thomas, as a “seeker all his life.” You dealt with depression and often life was hard for you because you really felt things so keenly. You had been a lawyer, but you became a bookbinder after your wife, Annie, complained that your interests were “too abstract.” You took to bookbinding very quickly, Thomas, and were brilliant at it, the best in the biz. In 1893, you set up your own book bindery, the Doves Bindery, named after your favorite pub, which was two doors along from the bindery. Emery, you had had a difficult childhood. You grew up in poverty, and you’d had to leave school, aged 13, after your father was blinded by an accident at work, so you needed to earn money for the family. You didn’t have much, but you did have some books, and you loved them. This led you to a career in typography. And in 1886, Emery, you also founded a photo-engraving company capable of unprecedentedly good reproductions of photographs and illustrations, magical for the time, the cuttingest of cutting edges. Both of you, Emery and Thomas, were big deals in the art and craft of making books. And once you found each other, you encouraged each other. In the best friendships, you do amplify one another. Shine a light in the mirror, double the light. Thomas once sent Emery a note written in a discarded book binding. It said, “To a perfect friend, an imperfect souvenir.” These words transform a piece of rubbish into an object with value. “Souvenir” is French for memory. And therefore, all souvenirs must be imperfect. 

MARTIN AUSTWICK: To a perfect friend / An imperfect souvenir / We don’t need reminders / Because you’re always near.

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Really near because Emery lived at No. 3 Hammersmith Terrace, and in 1897 Thomas and his family moved into No. 7 down the street. And half a mile east along the River Thames, Emery rented his business premises from Thomas, who worked at his bindery next door. So, your work and domestic lives were very close. Even that wasn’t close enough. You went on family holidays together, at neighboring cottages. And even that wasn’t close enough. After at least a decade of friendship, in 1899 you decided to take your relationship to the next level. You set up a printing press together, the Doves Press. 

MARTIN AUSTWICK: Friendship never ends / The Spice Girls taught us so / We’ll be each other’s ride or die / Until it’s time to go / We can carve them in stone / We can cast them in steel / What lasts longer than the words / Is the way they make you feel.

HELEN ZALTZMAN: The Doves Press was born. Thomas, you had all this passion for type design and what you called the “book beautiful,” but you didn’t really know anything about printing. And for that, you needed Emery, who knew all about how to set up and run a printing press. A few years earlier, Emery, you’d set up a press with none other than William Morris. And you helped him design his own typefaces. William Morris asked you to be his business partner. And you actually turned him down because you thought he would have been too controlling. 

[VIOLIN] 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: But when Thomas asked you to be his partner, you said yes. Emery, you couldn’t afford to contribute financially to the business. And Thomas, you didn’t have any money of your own, but your wife Annie was from a wealthy family, so she lent you money to start up the business: £1600, equivalent in today’s money to about £250,000. 

[GLOCKENSPIEL] 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: I know, Thomas, you were so excited! You wrote a letter to your teenage son, Dicky, about how you’d cleared out the attic at your bindery to fill with print equipment, and you couldn’t wait to sit on a high stool next to your great friend, Emery, both printing your hearts out! Were you excited too, Emery? 

[VIOLIN] 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Ah, nobody had asked you if you wanted to sit on a high stool, printing. It’s okay though, the two of you have the jewel in the Doves Press’ crown, your own in-house typeface: Doves Type. Doves Type was based on a typeface designed by French printer Nicolas Jenson in Venice in the late 1400s. But Thomas and Emery wanted their type to look to the future, not to the past. The ornate printing styles of the time Thomas found unreadable. Doves Press books were to be beautiful in themselves, without illustrations, without ornamentation. The letters should not be more beautiful than the literature they were forming. 

MARTIN AUSTWICK: We can carve them in stone / We can cast them in steel / What lasts longer than the words / Is the way they make you feel.

HELEN ZALTZMAN: The Doves Type was lauded at the time as “trimmed to a slim grace which suggests a racehorse at the top of its training, with no ounce of superfluous flesh, but full of spring and life.” Wow, people were really horny for type back then. 

[GLOCKENSPIEL] 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: And the Doves Press began printing books that were received as aesthetically revelatory with their undecorated white margins and text in plain black 16-point Doves Type, enlivened with graceful but unostentatious red letters, hand-drawn by the calligrapher Edward Johnston, who went on later to design the iconic typeface of the London transport system. The Doves Press was a huge influence on typography and book design. When the Doves Press printed Bibles, critics said, “Ooh, even if you’ve already got a Bible, you have to try these Doves Press Bibles! I don’t know, man, they’re just so much more Bible-y than the other Bibles!” These Doves Press Bibles now sell for £45,000. 

Thomas and Emery brought complementary skills to the Doves Press–Thomas perfectionism, Emery pragmatism. Thomas is all about the art of printing, and Emery is all about business. So it should have been a great success. But Thomas is about the art of printing and Emery is all business. Things started to go sour almost immediately. Who knows exactly what they said? Furious rows or giving each other the cold shoulder. Thomas and Emery, you were not on the same page. 

[GLOCKENSPIEL]

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Alright, Thomas, yes, you felt you were doing all the work of the printing and the proofreading and Emery was hardly ever there and didn’t respond to your lengthy arguments about the best and, in your opinion, only way to design the word “of.” 

MARTIN AUSTWICK: You were a perfect friend / But now I despair / “Of” still looked so wrong to me / And you still don’t care. 

[VIOLIN] 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Oh, yeah, Emery, you did care, but you had a whole other business to run because you had to earn money to live. And you needed to get things done quickly that Thomas liked to spend weeks or months mulling over. You were so busy you’d never stop to eat lunch, you’d keep going until dinner, which was wine and one large onion. 

[VIOLIN] 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Just a whole onion? 

[VIOLIN] 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Raw? 

[VIOLIN] 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Eaten like an apple? Also, you were there at the printing press when you could be. And when you did express your opinions about what was being printed, Thomas would respond somewhere between unreceptive and furious. 

[GLOCKENSPIEL] 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Thomas says, “Emery has onion breath.” But here was the real point of contention. Emery, you always referred to Doves as “our press,” whereas Thomas? You would say “my press.” Ouch. 

It was only two years between the release of the Spice Girls’ first single, Wannabe, and Geri leaving the band. Did that feel like longer to you? It did to me, but in reality, it was just under two years. And that was about the amount of time that the Doves Press had been going before Thomas wanted to break up with Emery or Emery wanted to break up with Thomas. Have any of you experienced friendship breakups in adulthood? Mine have felt more acutely painful than romantic breakups. And there aren’t even songs to soundtrack the predicament. 

MARTIN AUSTWICK: Friendship never ends. 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: [SINGING] Why would the Spice Girls lie? 

MARTIN AUSTWICK: We thought we’d be each other’s pal / Until one of us dies! 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: I don’t know if there is such a thing as a clean break, but there is such a thing as a quick break, and this was not it. The Doves Press officially opened in 1900. By 1902, Thomas and Emery’s friendship was in ruins, but the working partnership didn’t officially end for another seven years. Seven years is the length of time between the Spice Girls going on indefinite hiatus and reforming for a reunion tour, including Geri. That’s how long it took these two just to break up! And during that time, even though you had fallen out and were fighting a lot, you still went on holidays to the cottages that were next door to each other. Why? Why didn’t you go somewhere else? 

[GLOCKENSPIEL] 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Of course, you both didn’t see why you should be the one to not go. 

MARTIN AUSTWICK: Friendship never ends / Except for when it does / It hurts worse than gallstones / But at least we’ve still got Doves.

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Yeah, at least we’ve still got Doves, right, fellas? 

[VIOLIN] 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: One of the reasons Thomas and Emery’s breakup was so protracted was because of a battle over who would get custody of the Doves Type, which legally belonged to both of them. But Thomas wanted to keep Doves for his sole use. He didn’t want Emery, or anyone else, to print anything in Doves that he didn’t control. And remember, at this time, type was a physical object, or rather thousands of physical objects, so you couldn’t just make infinite digital copies. And if you didn’t have the type, then you didn’t have the type. So Thomas offered Emery a small amount of money to relinquish his claim on Doves. Emery didn’t accept. They battled back and forth, back and fourth, for years. 

Meanwhile, the Doves Press was financially failing. It was successful in making and selling its beautiful hand-printed books, but hand-printing is not where the big money is, or where the small money is. Private printing presses were a rich man’s game, and neither Thomas nor Emery was a rich man. Emery wanted to cut the losses and shut down the Doves Press. Thomas disagreed and banned Emery from the premises. To get some cash to keep the press going, Thomas and his wife, Annie, rented out their home, Annie went to stay with her sister, and Thomas moved into the attic of the Doves Press and Bindery, directly above where his ex-business partner, Emery, was still working at his photo-engraving business in the space he rented from Thomas. 

Things started to get so ugly between Thomas and Emery, court proceedings began. But somehow, late in 1908, they did at last reach a compromise. Thomas, who was a decade older than Emery, would continue to use the Doves Type for the rest of his life. And upon his death, it would become Emery’s. It’s a kind of morbid deal, but it was a deal. In 1909, after seven years of wrangling, the Doves Press partnership was, at last, declared officially over. And here is where our story turns to, “if I can’t have you, no one will, but make it tight.”

MARTIN AUSTWICK: When our friendship ends / Because the Spice Girls lied / I’ll need you to know I hate you / Even after I’ve died.

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Because what did you do, Thomas? What did you do? 

HELEN ZALTZMAN AND MARTIN AUSTWICK: You threw the Doves Type into the river. 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Throwing something away into a body of water sounds spontaneous, doesn’t it? Like, in a film, someone rips up a photo of their ex and flushes it down the toilet, or they throw their engagement ring into a lake. Whereas throwing away a whole typeface was a lot more time and effort. For once, Thomas, you chose action over abstraction. You planned this. For how long? 

[GLOCKENSPIEL]

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Seven years. 

[GLOCKENSPIEL] 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Thomas, you were really excited about this, and you were really excited about eventually getting found out. But you waited. You waited long enough to write a 116-page apologia about why you did it. Let’s not forget, the word “apologia” does not mean an “apology.” It’s a defense argument. You were going to publish it too, weren’t you Thomas, in 1913? But you realized it might be incriminating. So you waited. You waited until you wanted to close down the Doves Press and until you were printing the last ever Doves Book. And when you were ready, which was one night in August 1916, you waited till dusk. Then you walked the half-mile from home to Hammersmith Bridge that spans the River Thames. You crossed towards the south side where the water was deepest. And you threw the type into the river. And this wasn’t just a one-night thing because, Thomas, how much type can you carry in one go? 

[GLOCKENSPIEL] 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: 10 or 15 pounds. And how much type was there altogether? 

[GLOCKENSPIEL] 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: At least 2,600 pounds. So to get rid of 2,600 pounds of metal type, a maximum of 15 pounds at a time means you went to the bridge how many times? 

[GLOCKENSPIEL] 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: You’re a printer, not a mathematician. 

[VIOLIN] 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Thank you, Emery. 173. It took Thomas a minimum of 173 trips to throw away all of the Doves Type. Each night you took the latest page of type that you’d finished printing with and wrapped it up in white paper or put it in a bag or filled your pockets with it or, your favorite, put it into a wooden toolbox with a sliding lid so you could sprinkle it gently off the bridge. You didn’t want to make a splash. You didn’t want anyone to notice what you were doing. You were scared of being caught. It would be humiliating. It would be a crime because this type was legally promised to Emery. So you would wait until nobody else was around on foot. You would hope for a passing bus or car so the noise would cover any splashes. And you would tip the type into the water, night after night, page after page. Sometimes, Thomas, you messed up. Once a boat appeared from under the bridge and you nearly threw the type right into it. Another time, your bundles of type dropped onto a ledge by the feet of the bridge and you were tormented by these two packages, conspicuously wrapped in bright white paper, sitting there in full view. What if they gave you away? Someone passing by in a boat might think, “Oh, what are these?” and open them up and find the famous Doves Type. And oh, then there would be the police and the newspapers and the courts and the shame, the shame, the shame! Twice you started hiring a boat to go to retrieve the packages, but you decided that would be even more conspicuous. People on the bridge or on the river or its banks might think, “Hey, why is that guy in a boat picking up those packages? Did he throw a type away? Officer!” You justified your disposal of Doves as making a bequest to the river. But this all took a toll on you. Late summer changed to autumn changed to winter, and night after night you, a 76-year-old man, walked a mile round trip through the bitter cold with as much metal as you could carry–metal that you loved so much you must destroy it rather than let it live without you. For five months you kept making your trips to the bridge. And by the end of January 1917, you had drowned all the Doves. 

MARTIN AUSTWICK: Melt down the steel / Grind down the stone / There’s nothing left except dust and rust and bone. 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: After closing the Doves Press, Thomas destroyed all of the records. He said he wanted, “No history of petty details, only the books themselves.” I want the history of petty details, Thomas. And if you hadn’t been such a petty details aficionado–if you hadn’t thrown a whole typeface into the river–I wouldn’t be talking about you now. I remember you not because of the art and thoughts you added to the world, but the thing you took away. Is that really what you wanted? Is that the impression you wanted to leave?” Thomas, you were feeling your age and the fragility of your health, so you sold everything you could sell. You needed to prepare for the future. Your wife, Annie, had lost so much of her money on the Doves Press, you wanted something for her to live on after you died and to deal with the legal costs of you having destroyed the Doves type. On the 7th of September 1922, Thomas died peacefully in his bed in the attic of the Doves Bindery. And after that, four things happened– Or uncountable things happened. 

NEWS MONTAGE: Nearly a decade on, girl power is back… / The Spice Girls have announced that they are reforming for a world tour… / Okay, we did the Olympics… / Now they’re back… / We’re going to be performing all of our hits…

HELEN ZALTZMAN: But we’re going to focus on four things. One, the Doves Type was, of course, supposed to become Emery’s upon Thomas’ death. So, a few days after–not technically wrong, Emery, but maybe too soon–you asked Annie to hand it over. And of course she couldn’t because she didn’t have it. So you started legal proceedings. However, Annie and Emery didn’t fight it out for anywhere near as long as Thomas had. They settled quite quickly out of court. But that doesn’t bring back the Doves or patch up the emotional damage for either of them. The second thing that happened, Thomas had kept very detailed journals for his last four decades, and on the fourth anniversary of his death, Annie published them. And there was no mention of Emery–plenty of detail about which lines of poetry had been printed in which ink, but no Emery–nothing from all those years where you two hung out together at socialist meetings and the printing scene parties, nothing from all those family holidays in the neighboring cottages, nothing from all your good years or all the bad. Emery had been edited out of Thomas’ life. 

[VIOLIN]

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Yes, they made it look like you hadn’t existed, but their final years were all about you, so they clearly didn’t forget you. A hole where a memory used to be is still a memory-shaped hole. You take the type away, and you’ve still got the words it made. You take the words away, and you still got that impression they made. The third thing that happened, when Annie died four years after Thomas, her and Thomas’ ashes were placed in urns in a wall at the end of their garden, backing onto the River Thames. Two years later, the river overflowed and their ashes were gulped up by the water. Thomas and Annie were reunited with the Doves Type that had consumed so much of the last third of their lives. 

MARTIN AUSTWICK: Everything must end / The memories we made / Perhaps the real friends / Were the ones we threw away… 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: The fourth thing that happened? Emery, you tried to resurrect the Doves Type. You hired Edward Prince, who had cut the original Doves, to remake it. But it was too late. By then, Edward Prince was in his late 70s. His eyes and hands could no longer do such small, fiddly work to such exact specifications. Or maybe the real problem was you can’t recreate the memory. So Doves Type remained drowned and dead for close to a century until, in 2010, type designer Robert Green decided to try remaking it. 

ROBERT GREEN: I’m a freelance graphic designer. I was in between jobs, and I had nothing to do. I might as well just redraw this typeface. How hard can it be, you know? Famous last words. 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: He researched and drew and re-drew the letters, working off how they appeared on the pages printed by the Doves Press. But from those, he couldn’t reconstruct the type exactly because, every time the metal meets the page, the ink leaves a slightly different shape on the paper. 

ROBERT GREEN: It’s like tracing around a coastline. You’ve got the coastline of the land when the tide is in. And then the tide goes out slightly. 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: After working on it for three years, Robert released a digital version of Doves Type. But he wasn’t all that satisfied with it. 

ROBERT GREEN: It’s only going to be an impression of an impression, your idealized version of something. 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Robert decided he needed to see the original Doves Type for himself. And in 2014, he went looking for it in the River Thames. And beneath Hammersmith Bridge, at low tide, after only 20 minutes of searching for these tiny pieces of metal not much thicker than a matchstick, he found a lowercase “v,” and then an “i,” and an “e.” 

ROBERT GREEN: When you’re handling something that nobody’s touched for, in this case, nearly 100 years, it’s like for a second, time collapses. It did feel like I just literally reached out and caught it as he dropped it. And that’s a very strange feeling. 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Robert returned to the spot with a team of divers, and altogether they found 151 pieces of Doves Type, just a fraction of a full set. But there was enough for Robert to be able to see far more detail of the original letters and hone his designs. He added more characters, like the @ sign they hadn’t needed yet in 1900. And he made an alternative version of the lowercase “y” because Emery had always found the design of the one too aggressive. 

[VIOLIN]

HELEN ZALTZMAN: And Robert has released his updated version of Doves for public use. And anyone who buys it can use it for whatever they want. 

ROBERT GREEN: And this is exactly why Cobden-Sanderson threw it in the river. He didn’t want it used for advertising and things that he didn’t approve of. He only wanted the finest literature through his lens of what the finest literature and poetry and philosophy was. You know, he only ever wanted it used for that and nothing else. And of course, you let it out into the world and people are going to use it for letters to their bank manager. But of course you put something out into the world, it’s not yours anymore, there’s nothing you can do about it.

MARTIN AUSTWICK: So sorry Thomas / We can now print what we want / Keep calm and carry on, even though it’s the wrong font / Passive aggressive signs / Posters of “live, laugh, love” / T-shirts for my stag weekend, our eternal life for Doves / All those tiny monuments, two letters dissipated / Impressions of your lives in perfect souvenirs.

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Souvenirs was written, performed, and produced by Helen Zaltzman and Martin Austwick, with Adrienne LaBelle on violin. It was a Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4. 

ROMAN MARS: After the break, Helen and I talk about the inspiration behind her live shows. 

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: So we’re back with Helen Zaltzman. And I want to talk to you about this radio piece that’s adapted from a live show of The Illusionist. And I want you to tell me about the creation of the live show, how you tell stories with music and sound that involve the audience, and how do you think of it differently than when you’re creating radio? 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: I suppose because it’s very different communicating with a bunch of people in a room versus via the internet over… It could be a long time period between me making something and them listening to it, whereas stage is very immediate. But also you can get away with more, like you don’t have to have as many footnotes, I feel, in a stage production. Although, I did take care over the factual correctness of this because I hate to be corrected. And someone did come to see the show a couple of years ago, who works with Robert Green, that found the typeface and he said that was very accurate. And I felt proud. But usually a stage show, A, starts with a musical idea in my head and, B, is only written within 36 hours of the first performance. 

ROMAN MARS: Oh my goodness. 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Yeah, it’s horrible. It’s really horrible. How do I fix myself? It’s so bad. And then my husband, Martin, who plays the music is like, “I hate you so much. You always do this.” And yet I know that he can pull it out of the bag because it always happens. 

ROMAN MARS: And why was this the right story to tell in the live context? 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: I can’t remember. I had pitched to an audio festival, Resonate, in Richmond, Virginia, that I wanted to do a stage performance where audience members played characters but using only a sound effect. And I had read about this story around the same time in just Atlas Obscura mail out. But I don’t know why I put the two together. But the more I learned about it, the more fascinating I found it, not really because of the type, but because of the friendship breakdown. They really were very, very important friends to each other for more than a decade. And then it was quite a short period during which everything fell apart, like within two years. And then this immense fallout and the fact that you could hatch a revenge plan that took so many years to execute–I don’t have the patience for that. My revenge plan would have to be within 36 hours. 

ROMAN MARS: [CHUCKLING] All creation and destruction has to happen within 36 hours.

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Right. I think that’s enough time. 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, one of the things that strikes me when you’re thinking about creating musical accompaniment to a piece is the tantalizing aspect of having these two different characters who can be personified in music, kind of like Peter and the Wolf. 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: That was what I was thinking. I had pitched Peter and the Wolf, but it’s about Edwardian type design. But when I say it starts with a musical idea, it’s literally me in the shower, walking around thinking… Oh, suddenly a little four-line chorus has popped into my head. And then if I tweak the words, that’s where the emotional progression of the piece starts to form. So I’m like, “Okay, so it starts here. And then it gets sadder. And then it gets angry. And then it gets very weird.” And that’s all just tweaking a very silly little refrain. 

ROMAN MARS: You know, one of the things that struck me most when I heard it is when you bring in interview tape, which happens very late in the piece. Normally for a radio piece, it happens very early. 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Yeah, but pretty much everyone’s dead in this. 

ROMAN MARS: [CHUCKLING] Yeah, right. That’s true. The certain fact pattern of the story itself necessitates that maybe the interview tape happens later. But normally you would interview some historian and their voice would be up top and they would be helping you tell it or something like this. Like, it would be unusual for 75% of the piece to be your voice in music. And then somebody comes in. And it’s really striking itself as almost a piece of music to have the voice come in, to me. I was, like, into it when it found this new gear. 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Oh, cool. It is, I suppose–now you explained it to me–a really strange thing to do. And I wonder why I did it. But I think it’s partly because documentaries have been made about this before with the type designer, Robert Green, and doing it in that way where it is coming at it from the history of the type. And also these guys are remembered for two things, one of which is being friends with William Morris and the other is this typeface going in the river, but they’re not really remembered for other things that they did and for the emotions that I found so compelling. So I think, for me, that was the route rather than just this happened then and these were the people that they were running around with and blah, blah, blah. Not that those things aren’t important, but someone else had already done it. 

ROMAN MARS: It’s a different level of investigation to talk about their emotions in this process. 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: But then we only have these sources that have survived. So we have a lot of letters and diary entries from Thomas Cobden-Sanderson. We have some letters from Emery, but Thomas has had typically more control of the narrative because he was just much more prolific in expressing himself. And so for a lot of decades, people thought Emery was the jerk because he hadn’t complained as much. 

ROMAN MARS: Got it. Got it. 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: There’s just a very weird, little, incidental detail. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, please.

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Something that I found very funny that I would like to investigate further is, this is not the only typeface disposed of in the River Thames. There have been several. And I think there has got to be a better way of disposing of 2+ tons of metal. It’s lead. It seems like that’s not where it should go. 

ROMAN MARS: Is there a short story of other typefaces that ended up in the Thames that you know of? 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: There was a contemporary of Cobden-Sanderson and Walker called Charles Ricketts, who was an illustrator, and he had a printing press called the Vale Press from 1896 to 1904, whereupon a fire destroyed all their woodcuts. And he and his business colleagues decided to shut it down and threw the type in the river. So I don’t know if that’s where Thomas got the idea from and thought, “Well, this will be a nice benediction to the River Thames. What am I going to do? Leave it on the curb? I can’t do that.”

ROMAN MARS: It’s a good point. I mean, like, throwing things in the river has a long history of the way in which you dispose things. You know what I mean? It’s not unusual. It feels unusual when it comes to typefaces, I guess. 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Yes, because it is such a huge thing and so much effort. It’s so heavy. It’s hard to really understand because the pieces of type are tiny, they’re, like, a matchstick thick and less long. But each of those is two grams. Sorry, I don’t know what that is in old money. And then there’s hundreds of thousands of those, which really adds up.

ROMAN MARS: It’s a real effort. But then again, like, where else could you put it if you really were trying to get rid of it? You know, it’s not like the garbage man comes along and takes it. 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Yeah, what do you do with two tons of lead is just a question that, in the 21st century, we still struggle to answer. Can you melt it down and do something else with it? Do Etsy stuff? 

ROMAN MARS: [LAUGHING] You could probably do a lot of Etsy stuff. Well, Helen, it’s also been some fun to talk to you. 

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Thank you very much for having me. 

ROMAN MARS: Our interview with Helen Zaltzman was produced by Jeyca Medina-Gleason, mixed by Martín Gonzalez, music by Swan Real. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Emmett FitzGerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Talon and Rain Stradley and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north, in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our own Discord server. There’s a link to that, as well every past episode of 99PI, at 99pi.org.